Russians have a word (“trevoga”) for the spiritual qualms that you experience before traveling until you’re safely seated on your train/plane seat. I call it stress. Whatever it is, I feel it. The day of our departure, I went straight from classes to my internship, and then straight to choir rehearsal, leaving early around 8 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘cold’
Spring Break (Day 1): ‘Trevoga’ redeemed in U.U.
Posted: March 28, 2010 in Far East (Spring)Tags: Buryatia, cold, datsan, friends, guide book, hotel, Irish, jungle animal, Lenin, Lenin head, museum, тревога, трудность, Russian MTV, Snow, Sovietism, train, WiFi
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Holiday: Maslenitsa, for one
Posted: February 20, 2010 in Иркутск, Holidays & Tradition, Out of TownTags: bliny, Buryatia, cold, games, holiday, Maslenitsa, New Years, Orthodoxy, paganism, skiing, spring, St. Valentine's Day, tradition, winter
Last weekend, a festive craze swept Irkutsk into a mid-winter’s frenzy that would have been hard to produce any other way. Skies beautiful and clear, the winds calm, and the temperatures nothing too extraordinary at this point, there was plenty to be happy about, the first of which might very well have been the fact [...]
Where bananas are cold and green
Posted: February 5, 2010 in ИркутскTags: babushki, bananas, cold, food, host family, mayonnaise, Sovietism
The somatic triggers of late-winter rain’s smell and the gymnastics of skipping over the slush-puddles of Prague got spring on my mind a few weeks ago. The disappointing irony of the fact is that I’ve returned to the hard freeze of winter in Irkutsk. Night temps are comfortably below -30 deg. C. and not going [...]
Holiday: Christmas and Y2K+10
Posted: January 9, 2010 in Иркутск, Holidays & Tradition, Winter TravelTags: 5 minutes, Christmas, cold, friends, holiday, impromptu decorations, Kazanskaya station, Midnight mass, Moscow, New Years, Red Square, The London Pub, tradition, Trans-Siberian, WiFi
Wrapping up the end of a semester, year, and decade in Russia came with a few idiosyncrasies, challenges, and definite high points. Hardest of all was being away from family and friends in the comfort of my grandparents’ living rooms, wishing that my Christmas and New Year’s could be white. But, the trade-off turned out [...]
Holiday: It’s beginning to look at lot like New Year’s. . .
Posted: December 22, 2009 in Иркутск, Holidays & TraditionTags: Christmas, cold, consumerism, culture shock, friends, Irkutsk, New Years, Old New Years, Russian Christmas, shopping, Snow, Sovietism, tea, Uncle Frost
To properly describe my experience in the realm of the Russian “holiday season,” if such a concept actually exists as a period defined apart from the general conception of everyday life in this country, then I should go back to my Thanksgiving holiday here. Walking out of a delightful evening of intercultural dialogue (conversation over [...]
Week 13: Once upon a December (+Quotables)
Posted: December 4, 2009 in Иркутск, QuotableTags: cold, Decembrists, friends, Pushkin, Quotable, research symposium, Revolution, teachers, the color green, Volkonskii
December has a special meaning (kind of) for Eastern Siberia (the region of the middle of Siberia, not the Far East), if not just for Irkutsk. For better or for worse, it has nothing to do with the Mandy Moore song (blog post’s title) or the Disney movie Anastasia about the last Russian tsar, in [...]
Tradition: ‘It’s Happy Thanksgiving’
Posted: November 26, 2009 in Иркутск, Holidays & TraditionTags: Buryatian hymn, cold, culture shock, food, friends, poultry, Prelutsky, Russian pumpkins, Thanksgiving, tradition, Waldorf salad
“. . . Thanksgiving, hooray! / We’re going to dinner / at Grandma’s today,” is the little stanza from Jack Prelutsky’s collection of Thanksgiving-related children’s poetry that I end up recalling every year about this time. Obviously, I’m in Russia, and obviously, in Russia, American national holidays are not observed. So this year was a [...]
Week 11: First impressions of the Siberian ‘winter’
Posted: November 24, 2009 in ИркутскTags: cold, collective, furs, hats, ice, potholes, Snow
As far as I’ve been keeping track on the weather report, last week’s temperatures included the lowest low I’ve seen thus far (-28 deg. C.) and the highest high I’ve seen since it’s frozen (-3 deg. C.). Although autumn officially still has about a month to go, the magic of the Russian cold has been [...]
Week 8: Mongolia, Home-stay 3
Posted: November 8, 2009 in Mongolia (Fall)Tags: camels, cold, horses, host fam, kids, Mongolian language, Monty Python, panic, party bus, Paul & Mary, Peter, public transportation
Day 6-7 (Wed.-Thurs., Oct. 29-30): Getting out of dodge Family life. Our third family consisted of the mom and dad, an older son or two who weren’t around most of the time, assumably tending the livestock, a five-year-old son, a nineteen-year-old son, and an older daughter. The mom was really nice and friendly, and insisted [...]
Week 8: Mongolia, Home-stay 1
Posted: November 7, 2009 in Mongolia (Fall)Tags: Bulgan Province, cold, culture shock, dairy products, food, horses, jumping-jacks, matches, Mongolian language, motorcycles, nomads
Day 4-5 (Tues.-Wed., Oct. 27-28): Out on the Mongolian steppe Nomad hospitality. A mentally tumultuous hour after our arrival in Sansar, Bulgan Province, we were received into our first ger. Climbing out of the jeep with our stuff, the mother and daughter, having come out to greet us, helped us get our stuff inside the [...]
